Dora Charles Moves On From Paula Deen, and Makes It All About the Seasoning

Dora Charles, a former chef for Paula Deen, has written a new cookbook.Credit
Photographs by Dylan Wilson for The New York Times

GARDEN CITY, Ga. — In the kitchen of her double-wide trailer, Dora Charles sets spare ribs kissed with flour into a deep fryer and sautés yesterday’s collard greens with rice and onions. Her cooking is practiced and deliberate, learned at the hand of her father and her grandmother Hattie Smith, who showed her that seasoning something well and cooking it slowly encouraged flavors to bloom.

Ms. Charles, 61, is descended from sharecroppers and, before them, slaves. She owes her skill to the practiced hands of nimble cooks who could create pies out of whatever the children brought back from the woods, and satisfying meals from animal parts rejected by white plantation owners.

The lunch she is about to set on her table in this suburb of Savannah is a modern expression of the scarcity branch of the African-American culinary family tree. Some people simply call it make-do cooking.

“Country people in the South had to make do with what was at hand, what they could grow or trade or preserve,” she writes in her new cookbook, “A Real Southern Cook: In Her Savannah Kitchen.” “I see this food as a tribute to those who came before me, who worked so incredibly hard for so little.”

The book, which will be published next week by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, is itself a tribute to a woman who never imagined she would have to practice signing her name for fans — an exercise she watched her former employer perform countless times.

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Ms. Charles's book, "A Real Southern Cook," shares stories and recipes of a life spent cooking for family, church and friends. Here, Ms. Charles works on a recipe from her book with her niece Delphine Jones.Credit
Dylan Wilson for The New York Times

As Ms. Charles is the first to point out, the cookbook never would have happened if she had not given 22 years to Paula Deen, the celebrity chef whose empire began to crumble two years ago when she was accused of condoning racism and sexism at one of her restaurants, and admitted to using a racial epithet.

The book is the coda to their complicated relationship, offering an opportunity to reconsider the sometimes fraught transaction between black cooks and white employers that for decades defined the Southern kitchen.

In the heat of the Deen crisis, Ms. Charles, whom Ms. Deen used to call her soul sister, stepped out of the kitchen of the Lady & Sons, Ms. Deen’s flagship restaurant here, to say that she, too, had witnessed racism and had been treated poorly, for many years making $10 an hour.

Ms. Charles had been with Ms. Deen ever since she left her job at a Bennigan’s in 1991 for one at a Savannah Best Western hotel where Ms. Deen ran the restaurant. For more than two decades, Ms. Charles was key to the Deen team, such an integral part of the family that she attended Ms. Deen’s wedding and helped her on her signature cruises. Ms. Charles cooked side by side with Ms. Deen. She had a talent for making food taste good, and trained other cooks to do the same.

“If it’s a Southern dish,” Ms. Deen said in a video, “you better not put it out unless it passes this woman’s tongue.”

When a manager at a Deen restaurant sued Ms. Deen in federal court, charging sexual harassment and racial discrimination, Ms. Charles watched from the sidelines. But then she decided to go public with her own story. She left the restaurant, not knowing whether she would get a settlement or even another job.

“Oh my God, I had sweat popping off of me,” she said in an interview at her home, where Ms. Deen’s cookbooks still sit on the kitchen shelf. “I had tears for weeks, just weeks and weeks.”

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Ms. Charles, right, with Laura Daniels, an aunt.Credit
Dylan Wilson for The New York Times

A federal judge eventually dismissed the racial claims, and the rest of the suit was settled out of court. Ms. Charles developed a close friendship with Lisa T. Jackson, the general manager at Uncle Bubba’s Seafood and Oyster House, who brought the lawsuit. Ms. Jackson’s lawyer helped Ms. Charles with her own settlement and the book contract, and Ms. Jackson is helping Ms. Charles prepare for its publicity push.

The cookbook will come out on Sept. 8, the same day as Ms. Deen’s latest book, “Paula Deen Cuts the Fat,” written with Melissa Clark, who helped Ms. Deen write cookbooks before joining the New York Times staff. A version of the Deen book was to have been published by Ballantine Books before Random House canceled it in 2013; now, Paula Deen Ventures is releasing it in a deal with Hachette Book Group. Ms. Deen, whose comeback plan includes her own digital channel, podcasts, live shows and a new restaurant near Dollywood in Tennessee, declined to be interviewed.

Stories in Ms. Charles’s book about her former boss and friend, both warm and painful, make up only about six pages out of 266. The rest are rich with images of Ms. Charles’s family and of black life in the Georgia Lowcountry, taken by Robert Cooper, a local photographer. The book’s homey tone winds through a life spent cooking for family, church and friends.

Some recipes lean on ingredients like Accent, margarine and Miracle Whip. Biscuits are built from Sprite, buttermilk and Bisquick. But others, like crab cakes, poundcakes and jambalaya, are the best of scratch cooking.

Ms. Charles is a meticulous and methodical cook. She devotes two pages to teaching a reader how to fry, including advice to use salt or baking soda to put out a grease fire and yellow mustard to soothe burns.

“I find myself giving the same advice to cooks over and over again,” she writes, “so I may as well give it to you, too.”

Ms. Charles is also an astute interpreter of culture. A chapter on the sturdy, easy-to-transport Southern picnic and church supper dishes like Savannah red rice and Gone-to-Glory Potato Salad opens with her memory of trips to the beaches of Hilton Head, S.C. The sandy shores of Tybee Island, in Georgia, were much closer but closed to blacks when she was a girl.

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Ms. Charles stresses the importance of selecting good raw ingredients and building flavor at every step.Credit
Dylan Wilson for The New York Times

A Northerner once asked her if blacks and whites cooked differently.

“A lot of people don’t realize that Southern country food is pretty much the same for both black people and white people,” she answered, “except most black cooks are more concerned with seasoning.”

Many black cooks make their own special seasoning blends, she writes. She calls hers Savannah seasoning. It’s built from Lawry’s seasoned salt, granulated or powdered garlic, black pepper and table salt. It is dusted over ribs and pork chops and even mixed into baked spaghetti.

Ms. Charles stresses the importance of selecting good raw ingredients and building flavor at every step, like saving what she called fry-meat grease from bacon, sausage or pork chops to rub on sweet potatoes as they bake or to enliven rice and greens.

The book was born after Rux Martin, a longtime cookbook editor with her own imprint at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, found herself riveted by Ms. Charles’s story. At the time, Ms. Martin did not realize she would have to edit within the confines of Ms. Charles’s legal agreement with Ms. Deen, which is so restrictive that those involved are worried about even mentioning it.

“The reality was that the book was not put on the earth to speak ill of anyone, particularly someone who was so key in giving Dora the platform for the book,” Ms. Martin said. “When we started to do the book, we were really clear it was Dora’s food and her memories.”

Still, the project challenged Ms. Martin’s own assumptions about race and African-American cooking, and prompted her to re-examine the difficult period in Southern culinary history when the person who owned the cook also owned the recipe. Food historians and Southern cooks continue to debate how relations between white women and black women influenced the collective Southern culinary repertoire.

“I was just always so conscious of, ‘Wait, am I being patronizing?’ ” Ms. Martin said. “Is my white Yankee perspective getting in the way here? With every recipe, you can’t help but think of the larger implications.”

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Lost-and-found lemon poundcake.Credit
Dustin Chambers for The New York Times

It was the first time Ms. Charles had ever written down recipes, other than the large-scale versions she was asked to record for Ms. Deen. Her formal education had stopped with the seventh grade.

“For me to try to write it and do the recipes and measure everything all at the same time, my brain was going in circles,” Ms. Charles said.

So Ms. Martin hired the cookbook writer Fran McCullough, who has worked with some of the best and toughest cooking teachers around, among them the Mexican food authority Diana Kennedy.

Ms. McCullough, who lives in North Carolina, rented homes in Savannah where she would cook for weeks with Ms. Charles. They traveled to Boston to cook in the home of Doe Coover, the literary agent who was brought in to represent Ms. Charles.

Ms. McCullough introduced Ms. Charles to Kerrygold butter and smoked paprika, which made their way into recipes, some of which they created together. She encouraged Ms. Charles to get better at biscuit making and baking.

Ms. McCullough, Ms. Charles said, “got in my head and said exactly what I wanted to say, exactly what I was feeling.”

She also helped Ms. Charles work with a genealogist to trace her family roots and draw out recipes from her aunt Laura Daniels, at 83 the last surviving sibling of her father’s family. Like many relatives, Ms. Daniels bristles at what she says was Ms. Deen’s hateful treatment of her niece.

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“Some people go through a raw deal like that and they just get discouraged and they stop,” she said. “We just had to pray about it and pray and hope we’d get through. And she got through.”

Toni Tipton-Martin is a journalist and cook who this month will publish “The Jemima Code: Two Centuries of African American Cookbooks.” A groundbreaking bibliography, it annotates more than 150 African-American cookbooks in an attempt to show the breadth and impact of cooks and authors of African descent. She recently read Ms. Charles’s book.

In many ways, Ms. Tipton-Martin said, Ms. Deen was simply conducting business the way it had historically been done in the South, with Ms. Charles a sort of culinary sharecropper.

“The beauty for me,” she said, is that Ms. Charles “gives us the view into that kitchen where white and black hands came together. She is claiming her role in a way that previous generations had to be passive participants and watch their success from the outside.”

In her book, Ms. Charles praises Ms. Deen’s work ethic and sense of humor. But she can’t get past a promise she said Ms. Deen made to her as she moved out of the hotel kitchen and into her own restaurant. She took Ms. Charles’s hands in hers and looked into her eyes.

“Dora (she always pronounced it Doe-ra in her deep Southern accent), if I get rich you get rich,” Ms. Charles writes.

“It took me a while to see that God had opened a door for me, not closed one, and I could stand tall and walk through it,” she writes.

Ms. Deen sent her flowers when she heard about the book contract. In her book’s acknowledgments, Ms. Charles offers gratitude to Ms. Deen for recognizing her talents and setting her on a path to fulfill her dreams: “Without Paula, this book would not exist.”